This week I felt like taking a break from writing about Ravnica to instead tackle the release of Mirage on Magic Online.
I will admit up front that Mirage isn’t exactly the most profitable set to be drafting online since most of the rares aren’t worth anything, but the set harkens back to a simpler time and I still find it enjoyable to change things up. I mean hey, the main reason we all started playing the game was because it was a fun hobby right? I think some people get so hardcore with the PTQ circuit and everything that they forget to actually take the time to have some fun while they’re playing.
As I was saying, the set isn’t nearly as complex as Ravnica or Champions or other blocks in recent memory. One of my good friends actually called Mirage drafting “Wiffle ball Magic,” and I think that is a pretty good summation. One thing to remember though is that if you remember back to the playground days when you were a kid, you’ll recall that not everyone was good at Wiffle ball and the same holds true for drafting this set.
Essentially my goal this week is to give an overview on the Mirage draft format in case you decide you want to take a break from the same old stuff and draft something fun. I also participated in a Sealed Release Event and won that which earned me a seat in the Mirage Release Championships. As I did with my last Champions Sealed report, I want to go over my build and what happened in the matches and even if you’re still going to stick to only drafting RRR, maybe you’ll at least find my report enjoyable.
First off let me give some general pointers about the Mirage draft format in case there are those of you out there who are interested in learning more about it.
The best archetype far and away is G/R. The reason is simply that you have an amazing set of creatures to work with as well as tons of premiere burn spells. Kaervek’s Torch essentially dominates this format and while everyone will be taking it and splashing it anyway, it is still nice to have it in your main colors. Your goal when drafting G/R in Mirage is to try and get some mana accelerators (Quirion Elves, Moss Diamond, Fire Diamond) so that you can cast one of the many four-drops that are present in these colors on turn three. A key card for the archetype is Granger Guildmage and I would pick him very highly. Basically the only things you want to be taking over him are good burn like Torch or Incinerate or some other bomb like a dragon. Green also has a nice fatty in the form of Jungle Wurm who comes out fast and is very hard to deal with. You could also go with a super aggressive strategy centered around playing a Mtenda Lion or Guildmage on turn one and then Armor of Thorns on turn two which is very difficult to stop. One recommendation though is that you shouldn’t be picking the Lion too highly as there are two Guildmages in the common slot that can deal with him as well as Grave Servitude and Flare, both of which are very playable. Then of course you have the problem of your Lion being useless when you run into someone with Blue mana. Overall, he’s playable but I think he’s being picked too highly because players see a 2/1 for one mana and jump on it.
One misconception that I’ve seen is that most players overrate the Jolrael’s Centaur in comparison to his Red counterparts, the Burning Shield and Searing Spear Askaris. Both of the Red flankers are much stronger simply because they have very relevant abilities while the Centaur’s untargetability doesn’t usually add up to much in the Limited arena. I think the reason for this misconception is that the Centaur saw play in constructed back in the day while neither of the Red guys did. Oh, and Burning Shield is the best of the two and after you play with it, I think you’ll find it is nearly impossible for most decks to block in this format and acts as a Neurok Spy in many games.
Talruum Minotaur and Wild Elephant are both nice in the four-slot, and the Ekundu Cyclops is also a strong body. As far as tricks go, you have the aforementioned Armor of Thorns at the top of the list and Lightning Reflexes isn’t too far behind. Giant Mantis is probably the best overall four-drop though, since it gives you a great defense against most of the fliers you will encounter in this set. [Bah, another non-spider! – Knut, who can see Becker seething every time he drafts Mirage]
The simple truth here is that Green and Red are just the best two colors in the set and they go very well together. They are also both deep enough to support multiple people drafting them at the same table, so this is the deck I would aim for if you have a reasonable chance to draft it based on what you’re being passed.
Other strong archetypes include G/W and B/R. G/W has a strong creature set and some good tricks, but you may want to splash for some Red removal or a Dark Banishing in case an annoying utility guy makes it into play. B/R is playable even though the common Black creatures are severely lacking in this set, simply because there are some strong removal cards and you can use the Red creatures to supplement the deck.
One thing that’s for sure in this set is that Blue really got the shaft and I’d recommend avoiding it unless you open Mist Dragon or some other bomb. The color isn’t completely unplayable and you could wind up with a good deck if you’re the only one drafting it or possibly sharing with one other person, but the fact that most of your creatures will have Phasing isn’t too enticing and I haven’t seen anyone draft a really strong Blue deck unless it was based more in another color and splashing for Sandbar Crocodiles.
The best overall card in the set is Sacred Mesa, and after that, I’d take Savage Twister over anything.
Hopefully that gives you a brief overview of the format, though clearly there is much more to talk about and if you guys are interested please let me know in the forums and maybe I’ll do another piece on this set in coming weeks.
Now I want to move on to the Release Championship that took place this past Saturday and give you a chance to build my Mirage Sealed card pool and then follow through my matches.
Building the Deck
182 players entered this sealed deck tournament which would last a grueling 8 rounds of swiss play and then cut to Top 8 for a triple Mirage booster draft. Now I want to give you guys a chance to take a look at the card pool I received and figure out how you would’ve built it.
White
Alarum
Divine Offering
Illumination
Ward of Lights
2 Benevolent Unicorn
Ekundu Griffin
Femeref Knight
2 Mtenda Herder
Noble Elephant
Teremko Griffin
Wall of Resistance
Blue
Dream Cache
Dissipate
Jolt
Reality Ripple
Sapphire Charm
Energy Vortex
Azimaet Drake
Dream Fighter
Merfolk Raiders
Merfolk Seer
Sea Scryer
Black
Stupor
Bone Harvest
Ebony Charm
Soulshriek
Forsaken Wastes
Emfeeblement
Dirtwater Wraith
Gravebane Zombie
Mire Shade
Shadow Guildmage
Skulking Ghost
Urborg Panther
Wall of Corpses
Red
Builder’s Bane
Goblin Scouts
Stone Rain
Volcanic Geyser
Firebreathing
2 Lightning Reflexes
Burning Shield Askari
Crimson Roc
Dwarven Miner
Emberwilde Djinn
Goblin Tinkerer
2 Raging Spirit
Talruum Minotaur
Green
Rampant Growth
Sandstorm
Tranquil Domain
Barbed Foliage
Cycle of Life
Regeneration
Giant Mantis
2 Gibbering Hyenas
Granger Guildmage
Jungle Wurm
Mtenda Lion
Stalking Tiger
Uktabi Fairie
Unseen Walker
Wall of Roots
Gold
Kaervek’s Purg
Frenetic Efreet
Artifacts and Lands
Grasslands
Sand Golem
Ersatz Gnomes
Unerring Sling
Telim Tor’s Darts
You should be building now, not scrolling down!
So where do I begin?
The first thing you should see when you scan over the cards is that I’m almost definitely playing Red. It’s got Volcanic Geyser and a bunch of good men. White is almost deep enough to play with the two unicorns, two griffins, and some other good defensive stuff. Blue is atrocious as it usually is in this format. Green looks pretty solid, especially since it has a nice curve of guys and a Granger. Black is lacking in removal which is pretty much the main reason you’d want to be in that color in this format, so that’s not a good sign.
I ended up dragging all of the good cards down to the deck building area on Magic Online and quickly decided that playing G/R was the way to go. The only problem was that it was a few cards short and there were some options in terms of what I could splash. The nice thing about this was that I had Rampant Growth to help.
If I decided to splash White, I’d probably be doing so for the two Griffins in the four-slot, and the main motivation here of course is Grasslands to help out the mana. If you take a look at the Red and Green stuff you’ll see immediately that this isn’t such a great idea since the deck is already jam packed in the four-slot and the Griffins don’t add too much since I already have the Mantis.
The next option for a splash would be the Dream Cache and the Frenetic Efreet. Most people I’ve talked to about Dream Cache seem to underrate it – I really like the card. The easiest thing to compare it to would be Compulsive Research, since it helps you dig to bombs and also get out of a mana flood in the middle game. I also imagine that the situation is rare that you will put two cards on top of your deck instead of on the bottom. Frenetic Efreet is also a solid flier that can possibly dodge removal so nothing bad there.
The final splash option would be to just include the Kaervek’s Purge into the deck with a lone Swamp.
Clearly the decision was between splashing the Blue cards or the Purge and I went with the Purge because I felt like the main area the deck was lacking in was removal and it would also make the manabase better, since I only needed one Swamp instead of two Islands.
Now I realize this deck wasn’t the hardest thing in the world to build, but I think some people would build it with White and that’s just a mistake because of a few of the cards that are in the pool. Unseen Walker is practically a bomb in this format since pretty much everyone is playing Green and it will automatically win the game if you untap with it in play. Goblin Scouts also looks like a strictly worse Scatter the Seeds until you read it closer and realize that the tokens have Mountainwalk! If a lot of people play Green in this format, practically everyone includes Red in their deck even if only as a splash for Torch or Incinerate. Remember how I told you that Mirage was like Wiffle ball? Landwalk is pretty freakin’ amazing in Wiffle ball, let me tell you.
With all of that in mind, here is my build of the deck.
Granger Guildmage
Mtenda Lion
Uktabi Fairie
Unseen Walker
Wall of Roots
2 Gibbering Hyenas
Burning Shield Askari
Talruum Minotaur
2 Raging Spirit
Stalking Tiger
Giant Mantis
Jungle Wurm
Crimson Roc
Rampant Growth
2 Lighting Reflexes
Telim Tor’s Darts
Barbed Foliage
Volcanic Geyser
Kaervek’s Purge
Overall I think this is a very average deck for the format because it doesn’t have nearly as much removal as I’d like it to, but it does have the two powerful landwalking cards which make up for the otherwise apparent lack of bombs. Volcanic Geyser excluded of course.
Oh, and by the way, Telim Tor’s Darts is quite insane in this format, even though it looks like trash.
Round 1
Well I guess this guy signed up for the tournament and forgot to log onto Magic Online or something because he never showed up for this match and I was awarded a bye.
1-0
Round 2 against Sutherlands
This guy’s rating wasn’t anything impressive so I was hoping for an easy round.
Turns out that he played a very strong game of Magic and didn’t really make any mistakes from what I could see. It didn’t hurt that his deck was absolutely insane with Kaervek’s Torch, Savage Twister, Canopy Dragon, and a nice set of creatures.
Game one starts out badly for me as he immediately gets Granger Guildmage advantage and strands my Fairie in my hand. I start with Rampant Growth and Stalking Tiger and then advance to Jungle Wurm. He has a Viashino Warrior to go with his Granger and then plays a Giant Mantis so my attacks are quickly shut down. I can’t really get involved in combat because the Granger makes bad trades for me.
We end up just building up the board for a few turns and we both end up with a ton of creatures in play and I also drop the powerful Barbed Foliage. The annoying thing about this game is that I will just win if I can draw something to kill his Granger since I have Goblin Scouts and Unseen Walker in hand and he is playing both Forests and Mountains!
What ends up happening is that we both draw a ton of lands and he eventually starts pinging both of us with the Granger every turn which makes me believe he is holding a Torch and trying to get us both into range.
Then something really bad happens. He casts a Flare and Incinerate and then uses Savage Twister to completely wreck my side, leaving him with a few guys behind. The only good part of this is that I can now untap and empty all of the X/1’s that were sitting in my hand because his Granger has been removed. To make a long story short, the Barbed Foliage proves to be absolutely huge in this game by letting me trade lesser creatures like Goblin Tokens for his actual men and I eventually regain board control through the use of a well timed Lightning Reflexes as well as the fact that I was refusing to let him get any damage through. He ends up two points short of Torching me out before he has to use it on one of my creatures to stay alive and then concedes after he draws a blank in the face of my Unseen Walker and enough points of Forestwalk to put him away. All in all, a very close game and Barbed Foliage was the MVP by far.
I sideboard in Regeneration for one of the Lightning Reflexes because it is absolutely nuts in the G/R mirror, and I also take out my Uktabi Fairie and a Mountain and add the Bone Harvest and a Swamp to my deck to help combat the Savage Twister. Putting all of the guys he just killed back on top is an excellent response to the Twister when we’d both otherwise be in topdeck mode in the mid-late game.
Game two I start out with a very strong start of Mtenda Lion and Unseen Walker and start pounding on his slow draw. I play a Raging Spirit and eventually get Regeneration on it and manage to get him down to five life before he drops the powerful Canopy Dragon. This basically halts my offense and he starts building up the ground and eventually begins flying in with the Canopy while I keep drawing blanks off the top of my deck. The sad thing here was that if I drew a Swamp, Rampant Growth, or Volcanic Geyser at any point I would’ve just won this game as I had Bone Harvest in hand and could get back the Unseen Walker to finish him off. As it turned out, he had plenty of guys and eventually Twistered again to give himself a favorable board advantage and then finish me off with the dragon.
Game three I chose to draw of course and he mulliganned to six. Unfortunately this game had an anti-climactic ending when he stalled on two Forests and I went Granger, Wall of Roots, Raging Spirit, Jungle Wurm. In all fairness, I’m not sure he would’ve been able to stop my draw as I also had the Telim Tor’s Darts waiting in my hand to finish him off if he stabilized in combination with the Granger.
All in all, a very tight match and I think it could go either way, since he has bombs in the Twister and Dragon and I have landwalking capabilities and my deck was a bit more cohesive than his. He was forced to run Stone Rain in the maindeck because I think he was short on a card or two, and he also had a Regeneration though I’m not sure if it was main or if he boarded it in.
2-0
Round 3 against Eastern Glory
Game one looked okay at the start, as I used Wall of Roots to accelerate into a turn 3 Talruum. My opponent answered with Ekundu Cyclops which I dispatched with an instant speed Lightning Reflexes on my turn. This is something worth stopping to talk about as well, as my hand had another 3/3 in it and my deck in general is full of 3/3’s. The subject I want to address here is that most players don’t know how to play Lightning Reflexes correctly and will therefore almost always just cast it as an Enchantment instead of a combat trick. What you have to ask yourself is if your opponent has a creature that you need removed from the table as well as how likely they are to have a removal spell to two-for-one you if you just hardcast the enchantment. In this case, my deck full of 3/3’s clearly wanted the 3/4 guy off of the board so I want to use the Reflexes at instant speed as a trick, because hardcasting it will just make my Talruum get through for damage and consequently get me wrecked if my opponent can remove it. Also, even if the Talruum lives, the Cyclops renders my other 3/3’s essentially null as long as it’s back on defense, so it should be clear that you want to use the Reflex here as a trick to get the Cyclops out of the way for good now while my opponent is tapped out.
I realize all of what I just said is routine Magic thinking for most of you, but it’s very important and if someone didn’t realize it then I think this is as good a time as any to apply those logic principles.
Getting back to the game at hand, we traded off some 3/3’s and then my opponent cast the every annoying Savage Twister to three-for-one me on the next turn. I wasn’t playing around the card because he had played only 4 Swamps and a Mountain at that point and I had no reason to believe he had it in his deck until he dropped his slowrolled Forest. After the Twister he drops a few large monsters and I start drawing lands and quickly succumb.
Turns out after seeing all of the stuff he played against me that his deck is actually just a three-color mess featuring Drain Life as well as double Green and Red casting costs. I decide to board in Stone Rain for game two to maybe falter his mana development a bit and take out one of the Reflexes to make room.
Game two was the complete opposite of game one as I curved out with Granger, Fairie, Burning Shield Askari (which died to a Wall of Corpses), Reckless Spirit, and then Talruum Minotaur while my opponent had nothing to stop me and I just walked over him.
Game three he correctly chooses to draw first and I decide to gamble a bit and keep a questionable opening hand of the following:
Forest
Mountain
Granger Guildmage
Gibbering Hyenas
Stalking Tiger
Giant Mantis
Volcanic Geyser
The reason this hand is somewhat risky is because I need to draw lands and fast and I am on the play. Despite that, I didn’t want to risk mulliganning into something awful and having to go to five, and I don’t think it’s a terrible keep considering I have Rampant Growth and Wall of Roots in addition to 17 lands that I can draw. Also if I draw one land I should be able to mount some kind of offense with the Hyena and at least stall for time with Granger. Finally, his deck was clunky and I felt like I may have additional time if he got a weird mana draw or just a slow draw.
Well, I drew Talruum Minotaur on my first turn and things were looking grim, but I managed to get lucky and rip two lands in a row to have a nice curve and get the game going on the right foot. I started beating him down and when he finally stabilized and he had committed enough to the board that I was pretty sure he didn’t have the Twister, I dropped my Unseen Walker and got through with Stalking Tiger twice before finishing the job with the Geyser.
3-0
Round 4 against phOEnix.at
I didn’t have enough time to watch the replays of this match because it went completely to time and all three games were close. The next round started immediately after we finished and I was frantically trying to put together some summary of this match.
All I know is that game one I got wrecked by him casting Floodgate and then when I was beating on him with my Goblin Scout tokens he cast Chaos Charm to kill his own ‘Gate and wrath my board. Pretty obscure, but still a powerful combo.
His deck was base U/B/r and very strong with double Suq’Ata Firewalker, Dark Banishing, Kaervek’s Purge and other goodies.
Game two went really long and it ended up coming down to me trying to race around his Restless Dead. I had boarded in Emberwilde Djinn since he was only splashing Red and it managed to tie up his two Red mana and keep him from doing anything nasty for a while. Eventually I finished him by pinging him out with my Granger but I was low on time for game three and had to board in the Blue to try and win before I timed out.
Game three he got the nuts draw and wrecked me with Ray of Command and then dropped both Firewalkers and Restless Dead and killed anything big I played with removal spells. Soon enough I’d acquired my first loss of the tournament.
3-1
Round 5 against AnarchyPunk15
Game one I mulligan to five and my opening draw is quite marginal. I manage to develop somewhat of a board position until he plays Cerulean Wyvern which essentially goes all the way since I can’t draw Swamp or Rampant Growth to cast the Purge in my hand.
Game two I mulligan to four. Not kidding. My opening hand is four lands and I draw Wall of Roots and then Reckless Spirit. I then draw Burning Shield Askari and three more lands and proceed to get beaten into oblivion rather quickly.
3-2 and essentially out of contention for Top 8.
Round 6 against forgot to write down your name
Both of these games were quite a beating as I dropped an early Unseen Walker and his G/W deck simply couldn’t handle it. It got to the point where I wasn’t casting creatures because I was better off just using my mana to give Stalking Tiger forestwalk.
4-2
After this match I was quite annoyed that I most likely couldn’t make Top 8, and when my friend called me to see if I wanted to go see a movie, I had no problem just quitting the tournament. Turns out since I forgot to actually drop myself from it, I got losses in the last two rounds and still made Top 64, which was good for a couple packs.
In the end, Mirage is a fun set and I hope you’ll take the time to draft it and try something different sometime.
Nick Eisel
[email protected]
Soooooo & ThatsGameBoys on MODO